Remeet Review

Remeet Review – A complete game changer for remote work

23 October 2023

Why is Remeet different?

I see a lot of applications aimed at facilitating remote work but most are trying to tweak the way that things are currently done. Not so for Remeet. It has taken one of the biggest demons of remote working, meeting overload, and slaughtered it. Read our Remeet review and find out why.

Remeet isn’t so much a software application as a totally new way of addressing meetings and it works.

Meeting Overload

Meeting overload comes up time and again as one of the real bugbears of remote work with workers so tied down by meetings that they end up working crazy hours to get their real work done. There’s a lot of effort has gone into trying to resolve this. Companies with the longest experience of remote work like GitLab say they emphasise the use of asynchronous communication (messaging, e-mails and documents) over synchronous (meetings). They discuss issues via messaging or e-mail and use a short meeting at the end of that process to sort out a final agreement. It sounds logical and it’s definitely better than having endless hours of meetings but there’s a tendency to end up with huge message or e-mail strings, often going off at tangents, and still no solution – in fact after a while people can forget what the original question was. Google have proposed meeting free weeks and allow staff to block out work time in their calendars but this can just delay rather than resolve issues. Clockwise makes a decent attempt to address it by reorganising existing calendars to bunch meetings together. This allows employees more continuous working time but accepts the existing meeting culture rather than challenging it as Remeet does.

There had to be a better way of doing things

Remeet’s founders worked as part of a large distributed team where everyone was getting frustrated with how meetings were reducing their productivity. They decided there had to be a better way of doing things and went back to first principles to try to find out what people wanted from meetings. Why do meetings have to be an hour long? Why do meetings always start late? How can I get work done when meetings are constantly breaking into my day? Why is it so difficult and time consuming to find free time in other people’s diaries? Why do meetings always need an agenda when all I want to do is resolve an issue, not discuss world peace? Why do some people bother coming to my meetings when they spend half of the time reading e-mails or with some other distraction? Why does no-one write down what was agreed or if they do no-one ever gets time to read it?

So they built Remeet to fix this.

Topics not meetings

Remeet’s meetings are single issue and usually last no more than 10 minutes. Whoa, you’re thinking 10 minutes can’t possibly be enough, we usually spend the first 5 waiting for everyone to turn up and the next 5 moaning about the management. Well, Remeet’s users don’t agree, they’re very happy with 10 minutes and what’s more everyone turns up on time and they don’t waste time talking about the weather. Remeet calls its 10 minute meetings ‘Topics’ which makes sense because they’re single topic discussions. Thousands of Topics have been held by Remeet’s users, 70% of which were 10 minutes or shorter. Topics are recorded which means if there was a Topic you were interested in but weren’t invited to or couldn’t make, you can always watch the video – great for a 10 minute meeting, but try doing that for a one hour meeting and staying awake. Focus is much better too – the clicking of keyboards from distracted attendees just doesn’t happen in a 10 minute Topic. One factor that screams success for this approach is that users have indicated that no-shows are rare in Remeet Topics.

Actions and decisions are annotated during the ‘Topic’

Then there’s writing down what was agreed. Remeet fixes that problem too – it shows a notepad where actions and decisions can be agreed while the Topic is running and it automatically distributes this after the meeting via a close integration with Slack.

All of the pain removed from scheduling

Impressed? Well, it gets even better. Scheduling meetings can be a real pain especially where you need to book busy or senior people. In Remeet it’s a breeze. All users of Remeet set up blocks of time in their diaries indicating when they’re happy to attend meetings. You tell Remeet who you want to meet and what you want to talk about and that’s it! Remeet does the rest by matching Topics with blocks of meeting time. No more searching through diaries for free time – Remeet does it all for you. As you would if you were scheduling tasks, you can also include a priority for a Topic, anything from urgent to low. My main concern was that this would be abused by the guy who thinks that all of their Topics are urgent but in practice this hasn’t proved to be an issue with users self-policing and calling out anyone abusing priorities.

And if you need to schedule a follow-up meeting…it does that too!

As you might expect you can end up with successive back-to-back 10 minute Topics in your meeting block. Remeet has video conferencing built in so it can seamlessly switch you from one Topic to the next. Remeet shows a countdown so you know how much time is left in your Topic and if you don’t think you’re going to finish then just click ‘follow-up’ and Remeet schedules a follow-up meeting for you.

The Propinquity effect

Not content with solving the meeting issue, Remeet have gone one further and addressed another big issue for remote work – isolation, loneliness and getting to know everyone. Offices work socially because of the Propinquity effect. The more people meet each other the easier it is to build relationships. Remeet has addressed this with ‘Small Talk’. Small Talk looks for spare time in people’s meeting blocks and hooks them up for a bit of small talk. It’s an ice breaker that gets everyone introduced and talking to each other and has proved very popular. Small Talk can be turned on or off, be configured to be for two or more people and it’s really democratic – you might find yourself having a chat with a new joiner one day and the CEO the next! It’s become such a hit that customers are asking Remeet to expand Small Talk and that’s what they’re working on right now.

Conclusion

Remeet is a game changer for remote work. It doesn’t just help organise meetings, it makes remote meetings work far better than the office-based way of doing it. After seeing Remeet you start to wonder why all meeting and calendar apps don’t work this way.

Remeet works on Windows 10, macOS, Android and iOS and for Google and Microsoft Calendars. Pricing starts with a limited free version and a small team version at $10 per active user per month but Remeet say most customers go for the full version at $25 per user per month.

I’ve rarely seen a tool that’s blown my mind by the end of the demo. Remeet did just that – I absolutely love it and I think you will too! Enjoyed our Remeet review and want arrange a demo or start a trial? Request one here

Gren Gale is a consultant and speaker in Remote Work and Project Management and has been named both as one of the top 19 Key Opinion Leaders globally in remote work in Who’s Who in Remote Working? He is author of the Remote Project Manager and Remote Work The New Normal.

Articles and reviews on this site are written from an unbiased viewpoint. We only review products which are relevant to Remote Work or Project Management and ones we believe in. Once this Remeet review was written we looked to see if some of the links could generate affiliate income. It won’t make us rich but it helps pay the rent!